Problem: The website is way too busy and not organized well visually. It has too much text, too many colors, too many pictures, and too many links. There’s not enough “white space.” All of the different “sections” of the website run into each other, so there’s too much to look at, especially at the top of the homepage. Additionally, the text isn’t spaced or aligned well. As a result, the website is difficult to navigate.
The way I see it, we basically have a couple of seconds to interest/impress a web visitor thus encouraging them to spend some time on the site (which is obviously the objective of a communication tool like this) and/or help a web visitor do what they came to the site to do (get show information, buy a ticket, make a donation). When there’s this much going on, it takes too long to find what you’re looking for. This is certainly what my behavior is like when web browsing – I’m so impatient that if I don’t figure out what’s going on and how to navigate the site within, literally, seconds, I’m done.
Solution: When looking at other websites that I like/am willing to spend time browsing, instead of sections running into each other, the website is composed of different “sections” that are set apart from each other with a white background, like this:
Check out screen shots of these websites:
The clearly separated sections make the website easy to navigate and nice to look at.
Problem: Information that the website offers is not well organized and there’s way too much text.
One example: On the right side of the screen, we have the text “The Cedar Cultural Center Newsletter. Subscribe to the monthly Cedar email newsletter” then a blank for email address, then subscribe, unsubscribe radio buttons then a submit button. Can’t we simplify this to say “The Cedar’s monthly e-newsletter,” have a blank for email address, then buttons that say “sign me up” and “unsubscribe?”
Solution: Simplify and better organize links. Here is my suggested format for links at the top of the homepage:
Tickets could maybe even just be under “calendar.” It would be cool to eventually have a blog, and I don’t know where something like this would go, but we can always re-arrange and change what the main links are. I just think that we shouldn’t have more than 7 or so.
Problem: The text looks messy! The text is not lined up and makes it look “junky.” See “upcoming events” to the left. I think it is absolutely essential that this text be straightened out. It looks totally shoddy like this. Though I don’t know much about what goes on in the background of web design, it seems ridiculous that we would be unable to align these so it’s easier to read and looks nicer. Also, there’s something about that font that is unappealing. Am I the only one who thinks this? Maybe I’m just confusing my feelings about the overpopulated, misaligned text with the font.
Also, check out this text. Why can’t the text be aligned into justified paragraphs?
Proposed solution to the above issues – for the homepage, something like:
Moving from left to right, top to bottom: Box 1 would essentially stay the same as what’s in that place on the website now (The Cedar logo with our address and a recognizable image of the venue.) Though I will say that I question whether this “font” is inconsistent with our branding. I would actually prefer if we had this font:
It’s more consistent with what we use for our other marketing materials and I think it looks better.
Box 2 would have the main links (not too many) with just a solid box of color behind the words. Box 3 could have the same information that is in this place on the website now: upcoming events, but I really think that this text needs to be aligned to look cleaner. Box 4 can be a Cedar photo that rotates (new photo every time you go to the site.) This could be in place of the 6 photos at the top of the homepage. The photos as they are make things look too busy and I can’t even tell/am not even paying attention to what the photos are. Box 5 can be where people sign-up for the enewsletter. Should we have a place where people can sign up for our paper newsletter as well? Boxes 6 and 7 can have “featured stories” with photos and text. I think that limiting the number of stories featured on the homepage allows maximum impact. Old stories can move to other parts of the website under “artists” or “donate” or whatever category best describes it. Macalester has a big rotating photo on their website and a couple of places for “featured stories” as I’m suggesting. Check it:
1 comment:
Well, okay then - let me address a couple of these issues if I can --
Boy I hate typing into this tiny text box -
Anyway -
RE: the layout - it's probably time for a refresh - but as I've said, I think we need to have a consensus on where we're going and what the function of the site is - it doesn't sound like we're there, and we need a process for making those decisions.
As to the panel layout - I think that's a great idea - it was really how I'd envisioned the site in the first place, but there was a group decision to do the 3-column layout - So if there's a plan to move forward on this, we can certainly do something differen t with the layout. There would be a few ways to do this - either to do a theme where there are panel regions, or to us the ever-growing panels module in Drupal to do the layout. The panels module is probably a little more flexible.
But we also need to think beyond the front page - what does the rest of the site look like?
Most importantly though, I think there needs to be a consensus as to what the info on the front page will be - once there's a content plan we can theme the content.
I'm a little confused by the diagram on "simplifying the links" - I'm really not sure what is intended in the text diagram - sorry, don't mean to be dense.
Layout of text -
Okay, this is going to be a little pedantic. The basic problem here is that web design is nothing like print design. Everything we say in the layout is essentially a suggestion to the browser - which will then go and do whatever it damn well pleases. I can say that I want a font more or less like Arial (or in that family) and it should be bold, or strong, or emphasized somehow, and I'd like it to be this color please (unless you think otherwise).
But the browser may override some of that - it may not have that font and substitute another. It may be set to display the fonts bigger, or to display nothing smaller than 12 point. For example, I typically run with a minimum font size which gets bigger the older I get.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that we only have a certain amount of control over how things display. In the case of the events list, the reason it's laid out the way it is is that it's predictable. We never know how long the name of an act is going to be. We only know in very rough terms how wide the column is, since we're not completely sure how big the font will be on display.
So the problem here is - how would we put the date on the same line with the last part of the act's title when we know so little about how it's going to get displayed? In this case, the decision more or less was to have a layout where you can predict what it's going to look like. If we try to guess how long the last line will be, and then rearrange the text depending on that, we'll be wrong at least some portion of the time - which will end up with things like having the date displayed on top of the end of the last line. Or making bad decisions on how to break the last line. It's not a simple problem, especially since the sidebars are pretty small amounts of real estate. Lots of web design is deciding on a compromise between what you'd really like and what is predictable. I'm not saying that it can't be improved - but right off hand I'm a little stymied on how to do something that won't likely be worse, at least some of the time.
RE: the layout of paragraphs - is the objection here to the indents on the paragraphs? That's basically just the way the site was styled. It can get changed. But it is basically a style decision - and I think it's open to debate what the best layout decision might be. I'm not being defensive, I'm just saying that different people will have different opinions. One might think that the indents are messy, another will think that since it's more in line with typography in most printed materials, it's easier to read.
By the way - I think most of the ideas here are really good. But I think we need to do a lot more refinement, and work on what the decision-making process really is. Once we get some of this nailed down further we can talk more about how much work various parts of it will be. And which of them are physically possible without spending a fortune.
I also think some of the ideas of branching out into external apps like Facebook are kind of interesting. That's a pretty common trend, and I think particularly some of the new technologies like Google's opensocial stuff they announced yesterday will make a lot of this easier. It does raise a few questions though about whether you want to have one central resource or distributed ones - also a couple legal issues like whether trying to raise money on Facebook is substantially different than trying to raise it on your own web site - one could construe one as a local fundraising effort, and the other as a national one, which can be problematic.
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